Europe must prepare for war – a warning from Ukraine’s bloody front line

It is sweltering inside the abandoned building. The windows are blacked out with silvery insulation blankets. A woodstove thumps out heat in the low light when Mikita’s phone lights up with a message.

He shows photographs of the latest Russian drone attack along the snowclad wooded borders between Ukraine’s democracy and Russia’s dictatorship. It’s just a few miles from the over-heated room where Ukrainian troops, back from patrol, thaw out.

A Ukrainian military pickup has been turned inside out. Like a burst tin of humans.

Mikita flicks on through a macabre collection of photographs. Two middle-aged men dragged from a motorbike and shot, their bloodied bodies staining the snow. A couple ambushed in their SUV, both dead in their car seats. A delivery van’s windscreen collandered by Russian bullets, the passenger’s body hanging out sideways.

“The driver survived!” says Mikita chuckling.

This isn’t part of the 1,500km front line, now largely fixed, between Ukraine and the invading Russians. This is Sumy Oblast (Province). For now, the scene of cross border raiding by both sides – notable for Russia’s random murders.

“Neither side wants to, or can afford to, open a front here – so it’s a war of fighting patrols and ambush,” says Mikita – a former tour guide who leads several hundred men in this blizzard-whipped landscape.

Sumy has seen dramatic days in the last two years of war. Columns of Russian troops swept through the frozen fields, heading for Kyiv.

Multiple Launch Rocket Systems rained cluster bombs from “Stalin Organ” type launchers against Sumy City, and neighbouring Kharkiv, across the border on 24 February 2022.

In Kharkiv, reporting on where those rockets landed, I was convinced that Russian troops would be at the Palace Hotel, near the downtown seat of government, in days.

An ill prepared, one might say complacent, Ukrainian government, had not been convinced by Vladimir Putin’s well telegraphed desire to force Ukraine back into Moscow’s empire. Yet with piratical enthusiasm small groups of men, veterans of Russia’s 2014 invasion, were on hand to harry, and stop, Russian tank columns – literally in their tracks.

The sudden reversal of Russia’s invasion into a route back across the border was the turning point in Ukraine’s survival in 2022. It showed that Ukrainians could, and should, win. No matter how terrible the odds.

That autumn Kyiv drove the point home. With relatively limited support from the west Ukraine forced Russia out of half the land Putin’s forces took in Kherson and Kharkiv early in the war. Those days were bloody – but they were heady with hope.

Ukraine is now having its darkest hours so far.

The veterans who held the line are mostly dead. The survivors are still on the front lines. They’re no less determined to kill Russians, they’re no less determined that there should be no ceasefire. They’re also desperately short of ammunition.

Serge, 42, started fighting Russians near Avdiivka nine years ago. Now he’s back.

A view of destruction after a Russian drone strike hit a residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine (Photo: Arsen Dzodzaiev/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Ukraine’s forces have withdrawn a few miles from the coal-mining town at staggering cost to the Russians. And no more than a shrug from Serge.

As a volunteer militiaman fighting around the coal mines, and the nearby Donetsk airport in 2015, his passion vastly outstripped his infantry competence.

Since then, he’s lived Ukraine’s conflict. Chaotic defence giving way to trench warfare. He was part of the swashbuckling attacks on Russia’s convoys of Sumy heading for Kyiv.

He fought in the static grind of Bakhmut against Wagner mercenaries and Russian prisoners driven to advance by rifles at their backs. He killed, and killed, and is happy to kill more.

“We need the weapons to break the Russians not just hold them back. They can’t win – but without help neither can we,” says Serge.

Ukraine has prioritised mobilizing those with military experience. So, anyone who served after 2014, anyone who was in the Soviet army, can expect to find themselves on the front line. The average age at the front seems to be about 40. In Vietnam the average American soldier was 22.

Draft dodgers can bribe their way out at $1,000 (£790) a time to conscription officers.

No one wanted to fight in Bakhmut, nor Avdiivka on the eastern front. Neither has much strategic value yet both (now abandoned by Ukraine) became “meat grinders” for both sides. Russia forced thousands of untrained convicts into suicidal assaults on the towns.

Those attacks meant that Ukraine lost some of its best, and brightest, soldiers. The Kremlin gave no thought to Russia’s mountains of dead. Ukraine lost quality vs Russia’s quantity.

Russia’s now on a total war footing. The economy has seen a 123 per cent growth in defence spending. It grew by 3.5 per cent last year and is expected to grow by 2.5 per cent next year. Wages have shot up by 40 per cent in the sectors supporting the war.

“Russia believes that time is on its side in the war with Ukraine. But only if the West tires. Therefore, the Kremlin is placing its bets on war fatigue in the West and is working to amplify it. Putin calculates that without sufficient Western support, Ukraine will find it challenging to withstand Russia in the long term and achieve strategic success,” Estonia’s foreign intelligence agency said last week.

“Russia has chosen a path which is a long-term confrontation … and the Kremlin is probably anticipating a possible conflict with Nato within the next decade or so,” Kaupo Rosin, Estonia’s chief foreign spook said.

A woman in her bunker in Hostomel, a town located near Kyiv, heavily impacted by the ongoing war (Photo: Gian Marco Benedetto/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Ukraine now has to pull itself out of the doldrums while planning for a catastrophic loss of support from the US where $60bn in aid – most of it military – is being held up by Republicans in Washington DC.

It needs, its military says, to mobilise another 500,000 people for war. It needs to give them more than the five weeks training conscripts get now before being send off to die. It needs, of course, the weapons and the funding.

“If we don’t get it. We’ll fight on. But many more of us will die. But we’ll hold the Russians back because this is our country and we know what Russia will do here,” says “Sneaky” a reconnaissance battalion deputy commander in the east.

He’s referring to the Holodomor – when at least three million Ukrainians were starved by Stalin in the early 1930s in his campaign to eradicate Ukrainian nationalism, and steal the nation’s grain.

Or, indeed, the recent massacres in Irpin and Bucha, the razing of Izium and the wholesale kidnapping of Ukrainian children over the last two years.

All Nato members, as Donald Trump says, must meet the obligation to pay 2 per cent of GDP into Nato’s coffers.

Presidential hopeful Trump may not actually be in the pay of the Kremlin as Putin’s most successful agent of Russia’s FSB (the agency formerly known as the KBG). But he might as well be.

Not in Putin’s wildest dreams could Russia have such a useful friend in US politics. He blurted top secret information to the then Russian ambassador when he was in the White House. He left Pennsylvania Avenue with a vanload of classified documents he stored in his loo at home. He’s clearly got a crush on Putin and his unlimited power – and now doesn’t think that it would be out of order if the Kremlin ordered another invasion of a Western democracy.

Europe must contend with the prospect that the US may, come November, see the return of a president who claims that he told a European leader that he’d encourage the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” if Nato members didn’t pay for their own defence.

Servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces man a Flakpanzer Gepard, a German self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (Photo: Nina Liashonok / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

The Ukrainians are fearing the worst – and preparing to fight on but know that they’ve only got a few months before their already disastrous shortages in weapons and funds begin to require a shift into a bloody town-by-town war of survival that could engulf the whole country.

They know that the UK will stand by them. Boris Johnson’s a national heritage and feted guest in Kyiv where his support means everyone politely ignores the fact that he took his country out of the European Union and Ukrainians are, literally, dying to join. But support, Kyiv knows, from the UK is mercifully non-partisan. Everyone here is grateful to the British – and a little bitter “we’re dying so that other Europeans don’t have to” is a refrain you’ll hear on every inch of the front line – and every syllable is true.

One of Russia’s “useful idiots” back in the White House must form a central part of Europe’s planning. Europeans need to step up ahead of a disastrous change in the White House or face the most catastrophic consequences. Putin covets the Baltics, he wants to see the return of the Soviet Empire. That means taking more of Europe, or trying to.

Europe, like Ukraine, needs a gear change. From anxiety to aggression in anticipation of something terrible.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said recently that Europe needs to recognize that the time of peace is over. That prepping for war isn’t any longer the realm of the crazy hawks.

“This is urgently necessary because the painful reality is that we do not live in times of peace… We must move from manufacturing to mass production of armaments,” he said, arguing that “those who want peace must be able to successfully deter aggressors”.

If we don’t then Russia may soon sweep back into Sumy – and beyond…